Attack of the quarter-ton, 'fridge-sized' killer jellyfish The US government has warned that enormous swarms of killer jellyfish - some the size of fridges and weighing up to a quarter of a ton - are ravaging the world's oceans. Particularly aggressive specimens are said to be capable of causing serious damage to ships, and have even managed to knacker nuclear power plants. News of …
"Ladies and gentlemen, er, we've just lost the picture, but, uh, what we've seen speaks for itself. The cargo ship has been taken over -- "conquered", if you will -- by a master race of giant jellyfish. It's difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive earth men or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain, there is no stopping them; the jellyfish will soon be here. And I, for one, welcome our new jellyfish overlords."
Mine is the one covered in slime, ta.
Reminded of that episode of Blake's 7 where aliens have taken over Star One and when they get shot turn into what can only be described as massive jelly style bogies?
The point about the fist sized jellyfishes gave me visions of them trying to invade divers through their wetsuits. I'm a landlubber and staying well away from the ocean now!
All in all this is pretty scary stuff. When are the Western governments going to declare war on jellyfishes and declare posession of any gelatinous creature a terrorist offence? "Stay back copper! I've got a jar of jellied eels here and I'm not afraid to use them!"...
"Humanity's rule may not be overturned in a Day, then, but a Night of Slime as the squelchy brutes cut the power and plunge the peoples of the Earth into their final darkness."
A darkness punctuated by the eerie glow of green fluorescent protein, which may explain the Nobel committee's decision on the chemistry prize this year.
Is this a new measure of volume? There is potentially room for something between the football and the Olympic-sized swimming pool.
I for one will avoid tired "I for one" comments and instead think up some kind of reference to wondrous grot and secret cells.
I guess you could talk about climate change as the latter fire that heats the deep, actually. A win for victorian poetry!
"..It's a shame that you couldn't refrain yourself from mocking it..."
This is an article by Lewis Page on The Register. It's to be expected. You know he makes sense.
P.S. It's either '..refrain from mocking..' or '..restrain yourself from mocking..' You probably got confused there.
... I'm buying a nuclear bunker for when the jellyfish and machines slog it our over who will rule us. Me I'm in favour of the machines, they make better coffee.
Playmobil mock up of how this fight could look, in the interests of the public you know, we need to be prepared for this messy war (oh so messy).
Mines the one that has 'mahine overlords forever' on the back and on the inside has 'jelly fish overlords forever' (well you never know who will get the upper hand).
Blast them with UV rays! That's what Capt Kirk did to the ones he encountered on Deneva on stardate 3287.2... that's probably why their spawning grounds are in dark dank parts of the oceans, systematically cleansed of vertebrate life.
Oh woe is mankind, for Steve Irwin is gone, protector of us from seaborne invasions!
The jellyfish are breeding, swarming and eating cos there's an abundance of certain types of food, which is because we've been overfishing certain other fish that eat that same food. Jellyfish swarms are a bit of a ocean balancing-act and within a short period of time the amount of available food will start to drop and the jellyfish population with it.
If we stop the overintensive fishing now, the whole thing should work itself out quite nicely.
Let's vary our fish diets and stop throwing catch overboard. Let's make sure we don't haul whole shoals out of the see in a oner.
All will be well.
For some of us with busy lives*; El Reg is the only place to look for post Cnidarian survival guides (and Paris Hilton updates).
You should have included the useful hint that many jellyfish venoms can by pissing on it - the wound, not the jellyfish - that just makes them angry.
* for certain definitions of the word 'busy'.
the "I for one welcome our [...] overlords" meme has now well and truly jumped the shark, or, as I believe the hip kids are saying these days, "nuked the fridge".
But wait, that's no fridge... Ah, suddenly it becomes clear: these fridge-sized terror machines are the genetically mutated descendants of jellyfish which were casually hanging about and working on their tan in the Pacific during 50s A-bomb tests and have now come to seek their revenge and some decent Factor 8bn with moisturiser.
Now do you see what science has wrought?
The scariest thing about this is that, due to namby-pamby protesters we are left helpless in the face of this threat. I hope you're happy. I really do.
If anyone needs me, I'll be in the basement irradiating turtles. And newts.
Um, Scyphozoa and Hydrozoa are both classes within phylum Cnidaria, so what exactly is your point? Lewis is perfectly correct in that true jellyfish are members of the class Scyphozoa, but several members of the Hydrozoa are often referred to as jellyfish even though they are not.
If you're going to be pedantic, at least get it fucking right.
I hope you're right about us not eating certain fish stocks into extinction. I, too, await the day when we collectively see sense. It will be a joyous day, because it will allow me to bring back one of my favourite palindromes from retirement: Doc, note, I dissent! A fast never prevents a fatness! I diet on cod.
@Mike Richards: way I heard it, vinegar neutralises the sting. Might want that with a pinch of salt though.
And now (in honour of the distinctly pythonesque vista of blancmange overlords) for something completely different: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nej4xJe4Tdg
if I hadn't had the pants scared off me by numerous TV and other type stories of the end of civilisation etc. by Mega Tsunamis, crashing Asteroids, Mega Vocanoes and so on.
I did see the TV program about the Jellyfish a year ago (from memory) , but since then nothing about it,
Much about the horror of Global Warming / Climate Change , which is a wonderful thing for Governments everywhere, as they can tax us up to the eyeballs to save us from extermination.
If they can link Warming and Jellyfish then there will be much publicity.
I have seen the Black Sea disaster with my own eyes and your attempt at replicating the Sun style is frankly not funny.
There is however a simple way to save the planet - stop overfishing. The jellyfish bloom in the black sea happened after the fishing fleet turned onto the smallest plankton-feeding fish. I do not know the English name, it is about half the length of an adult sardine and as thick as a pencil. Bulgarians call it tca-tca. Taking it out of the food chain resulted in algal blooms, which in turn provided food for the jelly fish.
The lesson here is that if we want healthy seas, protecting the bottom of the food chain (the plankton feeders) is probably more important than protecting tuna, cod and other luxury fish at the top. If we ignore it, the sad tory of Black Sea will repeat elsewhere again and again.
Shame your journalist couldn't manage to take this story a bit more seriously. The main reason for the rise of the jellyfish is that overfishing is causing the collapse of whole marine ecosystems. The only thing left in these deadzones is jellyfish. With no predators left and no competition for resources jellyfish populations boom out of control.
Hope you like the taste of jellyfish - it's the only seafood you'll be getting in twenty years time.
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